Political science is a social science discipline concerned with the study of the state, nation, government, and politics and policies of government. Aristotle defined it as the study of the state.[1] It deals extensively with the theory and practice of politics, and the analysis of political systems, political behavior, and political culture. Political scientists “see themselves engaged in revealing the relationships underlying political events and conditions, and from these revelations they attempt to construct general principles about the way the world of politics works.”[2] Political science intersects with other fields; includingeconomics, law, sociology, history, anthropology, public administration, public policy, national politics, international relations, comparative politics,psychology, political organization, and political theory. Although it was codified in the 19th century, when all the social sciences were established, political science has ancient roots; indeed, it originated almost 2,500 years ago with the works of Plato and Aristotle.[3]
Political science is commonly divided into distinct sub-disciplines which together constitute the field:
• political theory
• comparative politics
• public administration
• international relations
• public law
• political methodology
Political theory is more concerned with contributions of various classical thinkers such as Aristotle, Niccolò Machiavelli, Cicero, Plato and many others. Comparative politics is the science of comparison and teaching of different types of constitutions, political actors, legislature and associated fields, all of them from an intrastate perspective. International relations deals with the interaction between nation-states as well as intergovernmental and transnational organizations.
Political science is methodologically diverse and appropriates many methods originating in social research. Approaches include positivism, interpretivism, rational choice theory, behavioralism,structuralism, post-structuralism, realism, institutionalism, and pluralism. Political science, as one of the social sciences, uses methods and techniques that relate to the kinds of inquiries sought: primary sources such as historical documents and official records, secondary sources such as scholarly journal articles, survey research, statistical analysis, case studies, experimental research and model building.
Overview
Political scientists study matters concerning the allocation and transfer of power in decision making, the roles and systems of governance including governments and international organizations,political behavior and public policies. They measure the success of governance and specific policies by examining many factors, including stability, justice, material wealth, and peace. Some political scientists seek to advance positive (attempt to describe how things are, as opposed to how they should be) theses by analyzing politics. Others advance normative theses, by making specific policy recommendations.
Political scientists provide the frameworks from which journalists, special interest groups, politicians, and the electorate analyze issues. According to Chaturvedy, “…Political scientists may serve as advisers to specific politicians, or even run for office as politicians themselves. Political scientists can be found working in governments, in political parties or as civil servants. They may be involved with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) or political movements. In a variety of capacities, people educated and trained in political science can add value and expertise tocorporations.[citation needed] Private enterprises such as think tanks, research institutes, polling and public relations firms often employ political scientists.”[citation needed] In the United States, political scientists known as “Americanists[disambiguation needed]” look at a variety of data including constitutional development, elections, public opinion and public policy such as Social Security reform, foreign policy, US Congressional committees, and the US Supreme Court — to name only a few issues.
“As a discipline” political science, possibly like the social sciences as a whole, “lives on the fault line between the ‘two cultures’ in the academy, the sciences and the humanities.“[4] Thus, in some American colleges where there is no separate School or College of Arts and Sciences per se, political science may be a separate department housed as part of a division or school of Humanities or Liberal Arts.[5] Whereas classical political philosophy is primarily defined by a concern for Hellenic and Enlightenment thought, political scientists are also marked by a great concern for “modernity” and the contemporary nation state, along with the study of classical thought, and as such share a greater deal of terminology with sociologists (e.g. structure and agency).
Most United States colleges and universities offer B.A. programs in political science. M.A. or M.A.T. and Ph.D. or Ed.D. programs are common at larger universities. The term political science is more popular in North America than elsewhere; other institutions, especially those outside the United States, see political science as part of a broader discipline of political studies, politics, orgovernment. While political science implies use of the scientific method, political studies implies a broader approach, although the naming of degree courses does not necessarily reflect their content.[6] Separate degree granting programs in international relations and public policy are not uncommon at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Master’s level programs in political science are common when political scientists engage in public administration.[7]
The national honor society for college and university students of government and politics in the United States is Pi Sigma Alpha.
Modern Political Science
Because political science is essentially a study of human behavior, in all aspects of politics, observations in controlled environments are often challenging to reproduce or duplicate, thoughexperimental methods are increasingly common (see experimental political science).[8] Citing this difficulty, former American Political Science Association President Lawrence Lowell once said “We are limited by the impossibility of experiment. Politics is an observational, not an experimental science.”[9] Because of this, political scientists have historically observed political elites, institutions, and individual or group behavior in order to identify patterns, draw generalizations, and build theories of politics.
Like all social sciences, political science faces the difficulty of observing human actors that can only be partially observed and who have the capacity for making conscious choices unlike other subjects such as non-human organisms in biology or inanimate objects as in physics. Despite the complexities, contemporary political science has progressed by adopting a variety of methods and theoretical approaches to understanding politics and methodological pluralism is a defining feature of contemporary political science. Often in contrast with national media, political science scholars seek to compile long-term data and research on the impact of political issues, producing in-depth articles breaking down the issues.
The advent of political science as a university discipline was marked by the creation of university departments and chairs with the title of political science arising in the late 19th century. In fact, the designation “political scientist” is typically for those with a doctorate in the field. Integrating political studies of the past into a unified discipline is ongoing, and the history of political science has provided a rich field for the growth of both normative and positive political science, with each part of the discipline sharing some historical predecessors. The American Political Science Association was founded in 1903 and the American Political Science Review was founded in 1906 in an effort to distinguish the study of politics from economics and other social phenomena.
Behavioral revolution and new institutionalism
In the 1950s and the 1960s, a behavioral revolution stressing the systematic and rigorously scientific study of individual and group behavior swept the discipline. A focus on studying political behavior, rather than institutions or interpretation of legal texts, characterized early behavioral political science, including work by Robert Dahl, Philip Converse, and in the collaboration between sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld and public opinion scholar Bernard Berelson.
The late 1960s and early 1970s witnessed a take off in the use of deductive, game theoretic formal modeling techniques aimed at generating a more analytical corpus of knowledge in the discipline. This period saw a surge of research that borrowed theory and methods from economics to study political institutions, such as the United States Congress, as well as political behavior, such as voting. William H. Riker and his colleagues and students at the University of Rochester were the main proponents of this shift.
Political Science in the Soviet Union
In the Soviet Union, political studies were carried out under the guise of some other disciplines like theory of state and law, area studies, international relations, studies of labor movement, “critique of bourgeois theories” etc. Soviet scholars were represented at the International Political Science Association since 1955 (since 1960 by the Soviet Association of Political and State Studies). In 1979 11th World Congress of IPSA took place in Moscow. Until the late years of the Soviet Union, political science as a field was subjected to tight control of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and was thus subjected to distrust. Anti-communists accused political scientists of being “false” scientists and of having served the old regime.[10]
After the fall of the Soviet Union, two of the major institutions dealing with political science – the Institute of Contemporary Social Theories and the Institute of International Affairs – were disbanded, and most of their members were left without jobs. These institutes were victims of the first wave of anti-communist euphoria and of in many ways unfounded ideological attacks, despite many of the people working in these institutes being competent scientists with a proficient knowledge of political science, and some of them having played an important role in reforming the Communist Party.[10] Today the Russian Political Science Association unites professionals-political scientists from in Russia.
Recent developments
In 2000, the Perestroika Movement in political science was introduced as a reaction against what supporters of the movement called the mathematicization of political science. Those who identified with the movement argued for a plurality of methodologies and approaches in political science and for more relevance of the discipline to those outside of it.[11]
Evolutionary psychology theories argue that humans have evolved a highly developed set of psychological mechanisms for dealing with politics. However, these mechanisms evolved for dealing with the small group politics that characterized the ancestral environment and not the much larger political structures in today’s world. This is argued to explain many important features and systematic cognitive biases of current politics.[12]
Subfields
Most political scientists work broadly in one or more of the following five areas:
• Comparative politics, including area studies
• International relations
• Political philosophy e.g. Political ethics
• Public administration
• Public law
Some political science departments also classify methodology as well as scholarship on the domestic politics of a particular country as distinct sub fields. In the United States, American politicsis often treated as a separate subfield.
In contrast to this traditional classification, some academic departments organize scholarship into thematic categories, including political philosophy, political behavior (including public opinion,collective action, and identity), and political institutions (including legislatures and international organizations). Political science conferences and journals often emphasize scholarship in more specific categories. The American Political Science Association, for example, has 42 organized sections that address various methods and topics of political inquiry.[13]
References
- Oxford Dictionary of Politics: political science
- Political Science. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1999-02-22). Retrieved on 2010-11-13.
- Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: political science
- Stoner, J. R. (22 February 2008). “Political Science and Political Education”. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the APSA Teaching and Learning Conference (APSA), San José Marriott, San José, California. Retrieved 2011-10-19. “… although one might allege the same for social science as a whole, political scientists receive funding from and play an active role in both the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities[in the United States].” <http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p245585_index.html>.
- See, e.g., the department of Political Science at Marist College, part of a Division of Humanities before that division became the School of Liberal Arts (c. 2000).
- Politics is the term used to refer to this field by Brandeis University; Cornell College; University of California, Santa Cruz; Hendrix College; Lake Forest College; Monash University; Mount Holyoke College; New York University; Occidental College; Princeton University; Ursinus College; and Washington and Lee University. Government is the term used for this field byBowdoin College; Colby College; Cornell University; Dartmouth College; Georgetown University; Harvard University; Smith College; Wesleyan University; the College of William and Mary; the University of Sydney; the University of Texas at Austin; the University of Ulster; theUniversity of Essex; Victoria University of Wellington, which has both a “School of Government” and a separate “Political Science and International Relations Programme”; and the London School of Economics and Political Science. Politics and government is the term used by theUniversity of Puget Sound. Government and politics is used by the University of Maryland, College Park.
- Vernardakis, George (1998). Graduate education in government. University Press of America. p. 77. ISBN 0-7618-1171-0. “…existing practices at Harvard University, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Michigan.”
- Druckman, James; Green, Donald; Kuklinski, James et al., eds. (2011). Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Political Science. New York: Cambridge University Press.ISBN 978-0-521-17455-8.
- Lowell, A. Lawrence. 1910. “The Physiology of Politics.” American Political Science Review 4: 1-15.
- Political Science in Russia: Institutionalization of the Discipline and Development of the Professional Community
- “Chronicle of Higher Education 2001”. Archived from the original on 2012-06-30.
- Michael Bang Petersen. “The evolutionary psychology of mass politics”. In Roberts, S. C. (2011). Roberts, S. Craig, ed. Applied Evolutionary Psychology. Oxford University Press.doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199586073.001.0001. ISBN 9780199586073. edit
- APSA Organized Sections | APSA
